Here, there, and everywhere.

There are so many things to tell you all about India. The bad times, the good times. The times Rich refrained from sending me home on the next plane and instead waited until my foul mood had passed. In most photos, one of us is either sick, cranky, or fed up. This photo from the Taj Mahal has one sick Rich, one cranky Me. We had gotten up for the 6 am visit to beat the crowds.



India is a tough place to travel, and just when you have decided to heck with it, I'm over this country, India sends out the secret weapon: the people. Especially the kids.

We are in the mountains, and we currently have a car and driver (ok, confession; we are being driven around India in an SUV - how the mighty have fallen.). Our first night out of Simla was wonderful. Tattapani is a little town on a river with natural hot springs. Rich got giggles from every school girl who walked by the table where we sat to read and drink tea. The scene goes like this. Us, sitting and drinking tea. The dirt road to the school is between us and the river, the dozens and dozens of school kids would drift by in clumps of five to ten kids. In each clump the staring eyes would fix on us as the kids walked by. One of us would smile and wave. One of the braver kids would call out "hullo", Hello, Rich would reply. The giggling would start and keep going through the brave "goodbye" one of the them would call out. More giggles. Repeat this scene about twenty times in one evening.

Tattapani was also where we met Kurt. Kurt is great. He is traveling around India on a rented motorbike, and back home in Salt Lake City he works as a bike mechanic and sign painter. He promised to come visit us in SF and experience the wonderfulness that is SF bike culture.

In Naggar, another mountain town where the temperature inside our concrete hotel was probably fifteen degrees colder then outside, we walked up the dirt roads that wound past what I called a living ethnographic museum. The area is mostly orchards and corn and livestock. The traditional houses are made from wood with slate roofs. The slate roofs are covered with drying laundry, corn, and chile peppers. Again, it's hard to stay mad at a country that has little kids popping up above the railings of the balconies and waving and calling "hello goodbye". As fascinated as we are by them, we get it back tenfold. Rich and I are in a few vacation photo albums now as we have teenage girls and honeymooning couples asking to take a photo with us.

Today our driver Rana drove us up toward the Rohtang pass. The pass is closed for the winter, it is at about 4,000 meters, he let us out when the road starting getting dodgy with snow and we walked a few kilometers up to admire the mountains and the eagles soaring overhead. The broad river valley is dotted with small villages that look as if they fight a never ending battle with the river.

The people in the mountains are so nice, and all seem so happy. The living here is more subsistence living, with easy access to clean (looking) water that flows off the mountains. Yesterday, a day when the sun declined to shine, we went into the restaurant attached to our hotel here in Manali where we ran into a British couple we had been chatting with that morning in Naggar. We all realized about the same time that a wood burning stove near the windows was actually hot and we huddled around it defrosting our hands and feet. An older Indian Gentleman seated near the stove turned and said "I can't believe what I am seeing, I thought you people were impervious to the cold!" We laughed. Impervious, yeah, right.